At the height of the frantic 2016 US presidential campaign a robust debate was happening about the underbelly of the internet. Young men were flocking to websites like 4chan and 8chan, where President Donald Trump was being portrayed as a hero figure – alongside a slew of extreme content promoting racial segregation, violence, murder and rape.

Although it seems astonishing after the violence in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, El Paso and elsewhere, at the time many were defending the trolls of the chans as ‘ironic’ or just a bunch of pranksters blowing off steam.

Advertisement

Advertisement

‘Everyone on the anonymous board hurls the most vicious slurs and stereotypes,’ wrote one right-wing site about 4chan in 2016, ‘but like jocks busting each other’s balls at the college bar, it’s obvious that there’s little real hatred present’.

In hindsight, that view seems dangerously naive. Three years later and the ‘chans’ are a key node in the resurgence of white nationalism.

El Paso residents protest against the visit of US President Donald Trump (Picture: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images)

They’re not the only threat – there’s some evidence of radicalisation on the left, and Islamist militancy remains an issue. But the online radical far-right is now being taken seriously as a major security concern.

Since the election of President Trump and a wave of mainstream attention, posters on 4chan and 8chan have become even more toxic and paranoid.

With sites like Voat – a Reddit clone – and Gab, ostensibly a ‘free speech’ haven, along with a host of blogs and other websites, they make up the ecosystem where the alt-right internet can go.

To be fair, the chans have hundreds of discussion boards on an array of topics, and many users eschew extremism.

The main far-right organising spaces on both 4chan and 8chan are individual message boards called /pol/ – short for ‘Politically Incorrect’.

That title is a huge understatement. The /pol/ boards are not slightly edgier versions of Twitter, but rather 24/7 firehoses of extremist propaganda, racist and sexist memes, fake news and conspiracy theories.

8chan in particular serves two main functions for white nationalists.

There will always be spaces where extremists congregate; ISIS propagandists moved to Telegram and incel communities still exist online.

First, it’s a radicalising space. If you fall into /pol/ from mainstream sites, you quickly get enveloped in a web of anger and lies: Fake statistics about black-on-white crime, gory photos, anti-Muslim screeds, and hype posts for conspiracy theories.

The killers hoped to maximise the propaganda value of their attacks. And by putting material in an anarchic space, they ensured that other users would save and spread it.

Since the election of President Trump and a wave of mainstream attention, posters on 4chan and 8chan have become even more toxic and paranoid (Picture: Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

So what can be done to limit the damage done by these extreme online spaces?

There is some evidence to suggest that taking away online forums slows down the extremists. One neo-Nazi site, The Daily Stormer, was targeted by hacker activists and internet companies threatened to no longer serve as the domain provider after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. It has bounced around to various addresses, and there are indications that its traffic has suffered as a result.

Forums dedicated to the toxic ‘incel’ culture have lost users as they have been chased off mainstream networks to increasingly obscure websites.

And when Isis started growing in strength in Syria and used Twitter to spread videos and pictures of beheadings, there was a broad-based attempt by mainstream social media companies to shut it down. To a large extent, those measures worked.

Advertisement

But of course tackling hate is not as simple as removing extremist websites. There will always be spaces where extremists congregate; Isis propagandists moved to Telegram and incel communities still exist online. If 8chan disappears, its users will find a new home.

Just because there are no simple solutions to the rise of extreme white nationalism, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any solutions. Researchers, organisations and officials have been gearing up to tackle the problem.

Whether they are successful or not depends on a number of factors, not least the support of law enforcement and politicians across the Western world.